Highbrow, lowbrow...the thorny problem of what to read in class (and why)

 ‘The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure; it is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one’s capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension. It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours. It is to change utterly one’s relations with the world. Not isolated and unconnected parts of life, but all of life’ (Arnold Bennett, 1901).

 ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach’.

How many times have we heard that old saw? Because, really, can you teach something you can’t do?

Well, yes, there is a way: by theorising that very thing you can’t do, or would like to do, or, well, that thing you teach. Or by canonising it, so you don’t have to engage with it. And here it is important to remember what happened to literature as an object of study. Despite arguments about who – and when – was the first, it is clear that there was no English Degree until late in the 19^th Century – that is, a university degree entirely dedicated to English Literature. Such a degree is not only important in recognising the existence of a body of texts, it’s also the start of the canonisation of literature: the creation of a hierarchy, the separation between the what-must-be-read from the what-is-not-worth-reading. And as we all know, such a separation has wide-ranging consequences, most notably the exclusion of texts from curricula and, by extension, the elitist nature of the texts to be studied, and so the elitist nature of the readers themselves. After all, if some texts are canonical they’re understood to be essential knowledge, and that prestige is automatically passed on to their readers.

This really is not new at all, and I can only refer you to the game invented by David Lodge in his comic, campus-novel ‘Changing Places’ (which I’ve just re-read), called Humiliation, where players select a novel they have not read which they think everyone else has read, or is expected (and assumed) to have read (the novel takes place in academia, and specifically within English departments). The humiliation comes from not having read the classics –  the canon. It’s not so much a literary humiliation as a social one: the canon signifies, as they say.

Pierre Bayard, a French academic specialised in Proust, wrote a fabulous little book some years ago called ‘How to talk about books you haven’t read’. Despite the tongue-in-cheek title, it’s a serious book asking a serious question: how much does knowing about literature leads to knowing about what you don’t actually know first-hand? And the answer is: a lot. How is that possible? Because literature is a continuum, it’s a world in itself in which everyone is related to someone – or something – else: what I wrote about in terms of a ‘Literature town’

Now you will ask: where am I going with this?

It’s simple really: when Literature became an academic pursuit, it felt its lack of a comparable apparatus of scientific evaluation and classification keenly. Physics, biology, mathematics, even Economics: these had developed seemingly independent tools to assess the veracity of their theories. Crack-pot ideas about the Ether, phlogiston, phrenology and magnetism could be refuted using a systematic, organised, scientific-sounding system – from Roger Bacon to Einstein through Newton and Darwin: these were the standards of what science actually was. So when the Structuralists emerged, they needed the same sort of irrefutable system of classification for Literature: Linnaeus had organised Life in a system, physicists had developed theories that explained all phenomena – why shouldn’t literature do the same? Even ethnology was doing it!

And herein lies the rub: Foucault pointed out that the categories we create somehow force us to think in terms of those same categories. By defining a body of texts to be studied in academia, one also defined what Literature is. And by extension, one also defined what literature was not. Susan Sontag has this immortal phrase: ‘To photograph is to frame. To frame is to exclude’. By focusing their lens on some texts and not others, academics automatically excluded those ‘others’. By doing so, they automatically created a ranking system, a hierarchy that percolated down to the schools, and the minds.

In a very entertaining – and, in many ways, very illuminating – little book published in 1901, the now rather forgotten but then extremely famous (and very rich thanks to his publications) author Arnold Bennett wrote of Mrs. E.T. Fowler that ’she has recently been classed with the greatest novelists of the nineteenth century’: all her books have long been out of print. Bennett also writes of ‘Miss Mary Cholmondeley's novel, Red Pottage, which has now attained a circulation of over 50,000 copies’ in just a few weeks – do you remember her?

What about ‘Mr Silas Hocking, probably the most popular of living novelists. Mr Hocking has been writing for over twenty years, and during the whole of that extended period the sale of his novels has averaged one thousand copies per week. The exact total of sales was last year [1900] one million and · ninety-three thousand one hundred and eighty-five copies’. Even a dedicated website calls Hocking ‘almost completely forgotten today’.

By contrast, Leonard Woolf recalls in a 1966 letter that as the publisher of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, he had sold…483 copies in two years (between 1923 and 1925). The Waste Land is often seen as the greatest poem in English of the 20^th Century, and the staple of any self-respecting English university department.

What’s my point here? My point is a well-known one: there is a considerable difference between what people read and enjoy reading, and what schools and universities define as literature – and by extension, as worthy of study, or really: as worthy of being read at all. And as Bennett, in another little book, says: ‘Shakespeare is ‘taught’ in schools; that is to say, the Board of Education and all authorities pedagogic bind themselves together in a determined effort to make every boy in the land a lifelong enemy of Shakespeare’. When the distance between what people do and what they are made to do is such, you do run the risk of turning them into enemies indeed. And then the problem is compounded by the way you introduce those texts.

And that remains a major problem at some schools, who continue to define literature as that body of canonised texts, universally praised and never read, a body that lends kudos and symbolic status while simultaneously conveying the idea that there are Great texts (and therefore lesser ones) which one should know about. Not texts one could know for oneself, or would benefit from knowing: texts one should know about. But as the distance is so great, those texts hardly ever lead to discussions; rather, they are introduced as facts in a History, as points on a chronology, and largely left well alone.

But the question is this: if you’re only going to introduce those texts as exemplars of something grander-than-thou, grander-than-others, is that the same as engaging with those texts?

If you’re going to reduce those texts to their (imaginary) unique ‘meaning’, and pass that on to learners as one passes on the law of gravity or the date of the French Revolution: what then? Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere how much she dislikes ‘reducing complex works of Art to simple thematic statements’: isn’t that a very real danger of clinging to the notion that using texts to explore oneself and the world is less important than knowing famous names and the titles of their work, which not one learner will ever read?

Symbolism is not fixed, it is contextual; meaning is not one: it is multiple. We must ask whether the nature of the texts we handle matters as much as the use we make of them; we musk ask to what extent we continue to handle the canon because of socio-cultural-historical reasons instead of considering texts as a source of knowledge: of others, and of oneself.

We must ask whether our task is not to use texts because to read ‘is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one’s capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension. It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours. It is to change utterly one’s relations with the world. Not isolated and unconnected parts of life, but all of life’.

 

• Pierre Bayard: How to talk about books you haven’t read [Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus] (2007)
• Arnold Bennet: Fame and fiction (1901), available here: https://ia600304.us.archive.org/32/items/fameandfictiona00benngoog/fameandfictiona00benngoog.pdf
• Arnold Bennett: Literary taste - how to form it (1909): https://ia801900.us.archive.org/30/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.202170/2015.202170.Literary-Taste.pdf
• David Lodge: Changing places (1975)
• Susan Sontag: On photography (1977). A classic, yes, but still an amazing, eye-opening, mind-expanding little book, and the needed companion to Barthes’ absolutely beautiful Camera lucida (1979)
• Leonard Woolf: Letters (pub.1992); he (famously) founded the Hogarth Press with his wife Virginia. He was a wonderful writer in his own right, a political campaigner, and his autobiography (in 5 volumes) is a masterpiece: try out the first volume, Sowing...you will thank me :)